But then, to read Eco well, it helps to know about everything. Not quite as substantial as The Name of the Rose but a smart...
The sun is shining, the world is spinning, and the great Italian novelist and semiotician has a new book—which means that a conspiracy theory must be afoot somewhere close by.
Working territory much resembling that of Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco (The Prague Cemetery, 2011, etc.) spins a knotty yarn. The time is June 1992—meaningful to Italian readers as the inauguration of an ostensibly clean period in a notoriously corrupt politics. A hack and ghostwriter, Colonna (whose name means “column”), is long on brains if short on talent; as he says, “Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners.…The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.” Ah, if he only knew the half of it, for just when it seems that he has no prospects left, he’s summoned to pen a memoir by a journalist who’s cooking up a Potemkin village of a newsmagazine, funded by a magnate who keeps secret the fact that Domani (tomorrow) will never actually hit the newsstand. Say what? Why write a book for a writer? Why staff a paper at much expense when it’s not really real? And why keep at it when the paper, stuffed with celebrity romances, scandal, and innuendo, is so obviously a vehicle for misinformation—and even blackmail? Those are modest mysteries compared to a larger one that implicates Italian history and society. Suffice it to say that much of the brouhaha concerns a certain baldheaded, square-jawed former dictator who brought Italy to ruin long before Colonna’s wheels ever started spinning, overlapping into the seamy sordidness of the Tangentopoli, or “bribegate,” of the narrative present. For all that, Eco draws in contemporary political figures, and dead popes, and assassination attempts, and terrorists, and banking scandals—well, it helps to know a bit about recent Italian history to keep up with what’s going on, especially when it’s often turned on its head.
But then, to read Eco well, it helps to know about everything. Not quite as substantial as The Name of the Rose but a smart puzzle and a delight all the same.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-63508-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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